Posts Tagged ‘ingelfinger’

Last week, an unpublished study by researchers including longtime Avandia critic and FDA reviewer David Graham — who was a well-known Vioxx critic before that — made a bit of a splash after it was leaked to Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman. The study found, Ed reported:

48,000 excess events attributable to Avandia among patients 65 years or older between 1999 and June 2009. And since 62 percent of Avandia use has been among people younger than 65, they estimate the national impact is probably 100,000 or more.

I’ll leave summarizing the findings to Ed, who deserves the kind of traffic this scoop should get. You can also read the manuscript, which the authors were planning to submit to JAMA. According to emails leaked along with the manuscript, they were concerned that the FDA would try to block their submission.

In genomics circles, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s (CSHL) annual Biology of Genomes meeting is a biggie. It consistently brings together the top players in genomics, and is always oversubscribed.

This year’s meeting, which was no exception, ran from May 11-15. A few days into the meeting, Discover‘s Kat McGowan emailed me. She had been following the many tweets from the meeting eagerly — hashtag #bg2010 — since she couldn’t attend. But she wondered whether all of those tweets violated CSHL’s media policy, which “requires all media attendees to obtain permission in advance from the relevant scientist prior to reporting any spoken or printed information gleaned from the meetings.”

That sounded like a good question to me, so I contacted CSHL’s media office, who put me in touch with executive director of courses and meetings David Stewart. David runs at least 50 such courses and meetings every year. Read the rest of this entry »

The fact that Nature published the study even after someone had reported on it seemed like a refreshing interpretation ofthe Ingelfinger Rule, about which I’ve written before. Basically, the rule, named for the New England Journal of Medicine editor who codified it, says that for a journal to publish a study, its results can’t have appeared elsewhere, with the exception of limited conference presentations.

The appearance of the Hochedlinger paper was refreshing because some reporters have complained bitterly about the Ingelfinger Rule, saying that it stifles communication and makes scientists afraid to speak to reporters. But here was a case in which the journal, which clearly knew about the news story, was happy to publish the study anyway.

Still, I wondered if Nature would still have published the paper if another news outlet had published on this before publication in the journal. And was Hochedlinger’s team still under embargo between March 31, when the Nature story appeared, and April 25? Read the rest of this entry »

Last fall, a researcher presented her work at a surgery conference, and a reporter for General Surgery Newsdecided the study was worth a story.

Soon afterward, the reporter submitted the story to General Surgery News editor Kevin Horty. In the meantime, the researcher had contacted the journal where she’d submitted the work, to make sure that a General Surgery News story wouldn’t be considered “prior publication” and jeopardize her ability to publish the paper.

(A note: I’m keeping this story deliberately vague to protect Kevin’s scoop. Presuming the study is published, I’ll do a follow-up.)

Sorry, the journal responded, it would: A few months had passed, the presentation was no longer news, and that the story would be considered prior publication because it would contain material that wasn’t in the conference abstract. The researcher shared that with the reporter, who shared it with Kevin.